Reflections on Education and Technology

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I plan to use my newly created Diigo account both for continuing professional development and to collaborate with my colleagues. First, I’ll use Diigo for professional development to keep track of the sites I find with inspiring new ideas and sites of Web 2.0 tools I want to use with my students. Currently, I’ve got links scattered here, there, and everywhere – some jotted down on sticky notes, some copy and pasted into a Word document, some located in the “Favorites” folder on my web browser – it will be nice to have everything organized and in one location. Having quick, efficient access to these sites will make me more likely to use them!

I would also like to use Diigo to collaborate with my colleagues. I teach Language Arts in a 5th-8th grade building. I get to work closely with my 5th grade content team, but rarely get a chance to talk to LA teachers from other grade levels. On the rare occasions that I’m able to talk with them, they also bring up some great new resource I’ve never heard of! I would love to start a group on Diigo so that all LA teachers in my building can share resources even though we don’t often get the chance to meet face to face.

Upon deciding that I want to use Kidblog with my students next year, I began thinking about how I will manage 60+ student blogs. If I require students to post on their blogs for assignments, I’ll need an efficient way to check their work. Visiting 60+ different blogs daily doesn’t seem very efficient. This is where RSS feed come into play. I can use my “The Old Reader” account to subscribe to each my students’ blogs. Yes, this might be a tedious task at first, inputting all their blog addresses, but after the initial work is complete, I will be able to see all new blog activity automatically, instead of visiting their individual pages. This takes the detective work out of things – I won’t need to hunt around for what I’m looking for, instead, the new content that my students post will come to me. I love the idea of using RSS feeds to monitor what happens on my students’ blogs. Using RSS will enhance my own learning by making my ability to access to my students’ blogs frequent and manageable.

Thanks so much for sharing about your experience with Kidblog! This tool seems like a safe way to introduce my fifth graders to the wonderful world of blogging since it’s such a secure environment. As I mentioned in my blog post (https://murphycnblog.wordpress.com/2014/06/12/kidblog/), you’ve inspired me to give Kidblog a try next school year!

I’ve determined that I would definitely like to use blogs with my students next school year, but in order to make that a reality, I’m going to need some guidance. Luckily, I found that guidance from the blog of another elementary school teacher. This teacher recommends Kidblog for educational blogging.

After reading this teacher’s post, Kidblog impressed me for the following reasons:

Student blogs are private – only seen by teachers and classmates, not out on the web for the world to see. (I realize that this could be a drawback to some, but because blogging will be a new learning experience for my 5th graders, I see this as a good thing for now!)

Teachers have control over content and can approve student comments before they are published.

Kidblog has an app, so students can post using various devices (iPods, Kindles, etc).

I’d love to use Kidblog in my own classroom to get students talking about books! As the teacher in the initial blog post did, I envision myself posting a question and asking students to comment on the question based on their book. This could be used as a way to increase accountability for independent reading. In my classroom, students are instructed to read at least 8 pages each day outside of school. This becomes difficult to monitor since students are basically on the “honor system.” However, I think a blog would be highly engaging and students would want to be able to contribute to it. As a result, they would have to get the reading done in order to participate. Perfect!

Honestly, my classroom needs a makeover. When I look around my fifth grade classroom on a typical day, I see fifth graders engaging with curriculum using the traditional paper and pencil method. Yes, they are working collaboratively. Yes, they are being challenged with higher order thinking prompts. But no, technology is not permeating my classroom like it should be. Why not? My excuses are typical, yet true. How can I constantly utilize technology when there is one mobile laptop cart to be shared among three classrooms? How will I manage my classroom when it takes some students ten minutes to type a sentence and other students ten seconds? How will I find the time to teach online etiquette when I barely have time to teach my content?

Although my hesitations contain elements of truth, there is another truth that cannot be ignored. The increasing technology in our society has changed the way students learn. Web 2.0 has changed the way students gain, create, and distribute information. It has changed the way students collaborate. It has changed the way students engage with content. Therefore, my classroom must change.

I know that my classroom must become a place where students constantly have the opportunity to increase their digital literacy skills. Now it’s time to make that knowledge a reality by finding a way to overcome my hesitations, and make my classroom a place where Web 2.0 tools are more commonplace than worksheets. It’s time that my classroom not only prepares my students for with content knowledge for the future, but also with digital literacy skills that will ensure their success in their future careers. To do this, my goal is to start small by selecting a handful of developmentally-appropriate Web 2.0 tools that I can begin implementing with my fifth graders next school year. Instead of becoming overwhelmed with all that Web 2.0 has to offer and stressing out over trying to do it all, I want myself and my students to become experts on only a few tools. This way, we can focus on quality, not quantity. In my classroom, I want to ensure that technology is used to aid learning, and not used simply for the sake of using technology.

If I’m able to achieve this goal, I see my classroom as a place where students are collaborating on group projects using wikis, posting comments about novels they’ve read to blogs, and both learning and teaching content through podcasts and screencasts. I’ve got some work to do, but I know my students will be receptive and as students from the “Net-Generation,” I know this is what they need.